could not write a life like Sterling's without feeling that his relation to Christianity and the Church was the great fact for him as for all of us; and that the change in him, from hearty acceptance of Christian doctrine and church organization to a rejection of the former and something very like contempt for the latter, needed explanation. That explanation he has sought in the overthrow of the balance of Sterling's life through repeated attacks of illness, which shut him out from practical duties, and threw him entirely upon speculation, thereby disproportionately developing the negative side of him, already too strong from early defects of education: and few persons will, we should think, be found to deny Mr. Hare's general position, that the pursuit of speculative philosophy as the business of life has this tendency; Mr. Carlyle, we should have supposed least of all men. But a special cause interferes with Mr. Carlyle's recognition of the principle as applicable to Sterling. Christianity, as understood commonly perhaps everywhere, except, it may be, at Weimar and Chelsea, and church formulas certainly as understood everywhere, he is in the habit of classing under a category which in his hands has become an extensive one--that of _shams_. He calls them by various forcible but ugly names,--as "old clothes," "spectral inanities," "gibbering phantoms," or, with plainer meaning, "huge unveracities and unrealities." That Sterling at any time of his life accepted these for "eternal verities" he cannot consider a step from the "no" to the "yes," nor their repudiation as a step backwards from the "yes" to the "no." Let him speak for himself. He is commenting on Sterling's entry into orders as Mr. Hare's curate at Hurstmonceaux: